Dubai and Abu Dhabi

After a fun 8 days in Austin, I had to rush back to Boston so that I could catch my group flight to Dubai for my Middle East immersion. The flight wasn't horrible - 6 hours from Boston to London and then 7 hours from London to Dubai. After arriving, we got a quick tour of the city by bus and then had lunch. After settling in I took a quick 1 hour nap which wasn't enough at all since I slept only 3-4 hours over the 2 flights and had only slept 3 hours the night before. But nevertheless, I went to the opening session for our trip and then headed to a New Year's Eve party on the beach.

After taking the early bus home I was confronted with a slight problem. My roommate who had decided to stay in had double locked the door so I couldn't get in. After about 1.5 hours, the hotel staff was finally able to find the master "master key" and let me in since my roommate was sleeping so soundly she didn't hear us repeatedly banging on the door, calling the room, and ringing the doorbell. Before the master "master key" was found, there was talk of breaking down the door since they were fearful that something bad had happened. It was a nice little bit of drama to cap off the evening.

Anyway, Dubai has been interesting so far - the way the city has been built up is crazy. While we're here, we will visit the famed sailboat hotel Burj Arab and tour the Palm Islands real estate development. It's also been really interesting to learn about Islamic finance and this growing sector.

We also made a day trip to Abu Dhabi today and went to the Emirates Palace Hotel. All I can say is it is amazing what oil money can make and buy. This place was so extravagant and we were there visiting Mubadala, an investment company for Abu Dhabi. Some of their recent investments have included buying a 7.5% share in AMD at the end of 2007. What blew me away was that they had all of this cash to spend so they just kept on investing in these capital intensive projects, like building the largest aluminum smelter in the world or helping bail AMD out of their cashflow problems.

Hopefully, at some point I'll have some time to post some photos so you can see what I'm talking about...